


somewhere there's a room for us to speak alone

by flashflights



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Angst, Autistic Keith (Voltron), Hurt No Comfort, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pining, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-28
Updated: 2016-08-30
Packaged: 2018-08-10 20:04:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7859299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flashflights/pseuds/flashflights
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Falling for your best friend is hard enough when they’re alive. Falling for your dead best friend just really fucking sucks. </p><p>Or, the AU where Shiro really does die on Kerberos, the team never gets together, and Keith lives in a haunted house in the desert.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. enchanting ghost

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a lyric from Sufjan Stevens' "Enchanting Ghost", which I literally have had on repeat through writing this entire thing pretty much. I don't know what to say about this other than I've been having a really weird week, and that no one should ever listen to that song that many times ever, because it's probably a health hazard. Sorry about this.
> 
> Thanks as usual to Cara (solisaureus) for being my lovely beta, and for suffering through this with me.

don’t carry on carrying efforts, don’t go!  
stay with me until I sleep within your host,  
or if it pleases you to leave me, just go;  
stopping you would stifle your enchanting ghost

 

 

❧

 

The day that Shiro disappears, Keith breaks two knuckles on the headboard of his bed; anything to keep himself from screaming. He tapes his fingers, but doesn’t bother with a trip to the infirmary, and he carries on. In the days that follow, he moves through the halls of the Garrison like a ghost, unnoticed. Without Shiro there, he skips meals without consequence. He still goes to his classes, still attends to his basic duties, and he’s never had much social life to speak of, but other than the base requirements, he does what he can to stay as far from other people as possible. He doesn’t really have friends who might catch him as he passes and try to console him, and all the people carrying on and mourning Shiro and the rest of the team who’d been lost in the crash, as if they really knew him, they have nothing to do with him. When his heart starts to weigh him down, he flexes his broken fingers until the pain overwhelms the loss. His skin has gone so purple it’s nearly black. No one really gets close enough to notice.

 

Three weeks after Shiro disappears, Keith snaps a pencil in half and fashions himself a splint. He doesn’t have to hide the injury any more - he isn’t staying. Some asshole who’d never met him had said the wrong thing, and Keith had broken a third knuckle breaking the guy’s nose. Besides, he’d crashed the simulators one time too many for his instructors’ liking. He tapes all three fingers together, admires the bruise, and smiles. He packs a single bag, fills it with everything he owns, and a few things that aren’t technically his that he figures the Garrison won’t miss until he’s gone. They give him one day to pack and get out: it takes him two hours. He takes with him everything he can find that Shiro left behind that hasn’t been claimed by his family yet, and it amounts to this: one sketchbook, a handful of pens, and his hoverbike.

 

He follows the sunset out into the desert, and somehow, he isn’t surprised when he finds the house. The world he lives in now isn’t how it was supposed to be; it’s fractured and warped, funhouse mirrors and black bruises turning gold, sunsets that tell him to follow them, to follow until he finds himself, or something that can pass as close enough. He breaks the boards off from over the front door, and decides it’s as good a place as any to start looking.

 

The desert air at night is vast and empty and quiet, and on long nights when he doesn’t go out searching (for what, he’s not quite sure yet - searching for its own sake, forging paths ahead just to have paths to follow back again, walking just to keep from standing still), he sometimes likes to sit out on the old rocking chair on the cabin porch, and watch the distant lights. In one direction, the Garrison rests on the horizon, a constant reminder of the life he’s left behind. In all others, the desert stretches on without end; red rock formations rising up from the sand like the rusted-over remnants of some ancient civilisation, or the worn-down bones of giant, long-dead beasts. There are things buried out there that have not been un-buried in a long, long time. Keith can’t say how he knows. It’s as if the desert speaks to him, though it doesn’t speak in words. He feels it like a phantom limb, an echo of a life he isn’t living, but maybe should be. Somewhere out there, it feels like something old is waking up. At night, gazing out to where the fireflies are indistinguishable from the stars, Keith knows that it wants to be found. His desert, as he has come to think of it, is a place where anything can happen, but nothing ever does. He has to believe that whatever it is, it brought him here for a reason.

 

Six weeks after Shiro disappears, Keith sees his ghost for the first time.

 

Keith is standing in the dingy cabin living room, bent over the makeshift coffee table at its centre, sorting through scribbled notes and photo snapshots. Just out of his reach, a mug of tea sits cold and oversteeped. He rearranges the papers and he stares, waiting for a pattern to emerge. There’s strange energy in the desert, just waiting to be found. Any day now, it’ll all be clear, the way things were clear before. Outside, the desert winds whisper over the sand, and he longs to know their secrets. Above all else, he just wants answers. He just wants to sleep through the night again.

 

The apparition is there when he looks up, as if it had been there all along. Three things occur to him in succession: the first is that he’s gone mad, from grief, from lack of proper food or sleep, from some likely combination of the two. The second is better - this is the final moments of a dream, and the apparition is the reality that’s calling him back to it. The third is that this means they had been telling the truth when they said the mission failed: if Shiro is here, then he isn’t there anymore. If Shiro is here, then that means he’s really gone.

 

“Are you real?” he asks. It’s a stupid question, but it’s all he has.

 

The apparition looks down, examining his hands, or perhaps examining the table through the lens of them. Everything about him is both there and not, and Keith can see him just as he can see right through him. “I’m not sure,” says the apparition.

 

Keith takes a deep breath that sticks in his throat. The air inside the cabin is colder than it ought to be. “Kerberos,” he says, trying to keep his voice steady. “Your mission failed. Pilot error, or so they said. I didn’t believe them,” he adds.

 

“You were right not to,” the apparition says. He looks older than Keith remembers. A lot older.

 

“So you’re alive then?” Keith can’t help the hope creeping into his voice. If Shiro is alive, then that makes this a dream, or a hallucination, or… something. He’s always hated the idea of losing his mind, but if it’s that or lose Shiro, admit he’s really lost him, then he’s kind of okay with this being a fever dream.

 

The apparition’s face falls, and the hope dies in Keith’s throat. Slowly, he shakes his head. “I’m sorry, Keith,” he says. “They may have gotten the story wrong, but the ending’s still the same.”

 

Keith tries and fails to keep his voice from cracking. “You me that promised you’d come back.”

 

The apparition smiles. “I did,” he says.

 

Six weeks after Shiro disappears, Keith finally accepts that he’s gone. It doesn’t mean that he’s about to let him go.

 

❧

 

“There’s something out here,” Keith tells him, poring over his charts, late one morning about a week after he first appears. Shiro hasn’t shown up yet since Keith’s been awake, but he knows he’s around somewhere. It’s taking time to get used to, but there’s a certain comfort to living in a haunted house.

 

The strangest part of it is that there’s still a piece of Keith hasn’t quite fully accepted that Shiro’s really dead at all. The way he figures it, there’s still a possibility that he’s just completely lost it, that maybe this old cabin is full of asbestos, or there’s something strange in the pipes. That it’s all in his head. If that’s true, then Shiro might still be out there, stranded in space but very much alive, and if he is, then Keith knows he’s doing everything he can to fight his way home. It’s the best possibility, when he can believe in it; he’d rather be crazy than left behind. Of course, it isn’t that easy. Not that Keith is an expert on the matter, but Shiro’s ghost just doesn’t _feel_ like a hallucination. He doesn’t feel like a part of Keith’s mind, he feels like his own person, and that person seems to get a little stronger every day, a little less distant, a little more real.

 

The thing is, Keith just doesn’t believe in ghosts; he believes in things that he can touch, in things that he can understand. He doesn’t believe in strange energies that draw you to abandoned houses in the desert and send you out wandering for clues to connect dots that may or may not exist and point to who-knows-what either. His whole life since leaving the Garrison has been charmed and strange, filled with endless questions and scarce few answers, and it bothers him how little it bothers him. Structure had kept his life in check, and now that he has nothing left to keep him inside the lines, he spends almost all his time on the outside. He eats poorly, sleeps worse, staying up for days on end, sleeping into the late hours of night and going out into the desert with a flashlight and a notebook, nothing to guide him but his instincts and the stars. And when he comes home, he doesn’t come home to an empty house anymore. It’s not a life he ever thought he’d live, but it’s the only life he can manage. Maybe that’s just the way it goes: when you lose everything you ever believed in, the only thing you have left is to start believing in magic.

 

Either way, the fact is that Keith is haunted. If it’s all the same, he’d rather it be by an actual ghost than just the memory of one. Memories make lousy houseguests.

 

❧

 

Keith can always feel it when Shiro comes into the room: he has a presence like a summer breeze, cool and gentle. Sometimes, he wonders where Shiro is when he isn’t with him, but he isn’t ready to ask just yet. His sanity in the matter is a careful balancing act that demands he know just enough and no more than that, so he doesn’t have to think too hard about what it means that this is how things are now, and that this is how they’ll be forever. Having Shiro there with him like this had put his grief on hold, and he intends to let it stay there indefinitely. After all, there’s no reason to mourn someone you see every day.

 

“What exactly are you looking for?” Shiro asks, peering over Keith’s shoulder, down at the contents of the coffee table (if it can really be called that, such as it is - a plank of wood on a few haphazard cinder blocks and stacks of books). The hair on the back of Keith’s neck stands on end from the proximity, and a shiver runs down his spine. Shiro isn’t touching him, but he’s close enough that Keith can feel him. It’s nothing like when he was alive - Keith hates that thought _when he was alive_ \- when Shiro was always warm, never hesitating to touch him, but always careful in the way he did so nonetheless.

 

Keith banishes the memory (Shiro’s hand on his shoulder, warmth spreading through Keith’s body from the touch, gentle and comforting and firm and anchoring and gone, gone, gone) and redoubles his attentions to the charts, photos, and notes spread out in front of him. There’s no point in dwelling on things he’ll never have again. “I’m not sure,” Keith admits. “Some kind of big energy well or something. Maybe it’s a secret government project, or maybe not. Either way, I’m going to find it.”

 

“You don’t have a lot to go off of.”

 

“Not yet.” Keith frowns down at the coffee table. There’s a lot of pieces missing. More than are there, probably, if he’s being honest.

 

“But you will.”

 

Keith turns to face Shiro, surprise evidently plain on his face, because it makes Shiro’s confident smile crack into a soft chuckle. It’s strange, seeing him like this. He’s getting used to it, gradually, but he’ll probably never fully adjust. Keith can see every one of Shiro’s teeth, faintly, through his skin, when he smiles, and the sound when he laughs has a faint echo.

 

“I mean it,” Shiro says. “You’re determined. I know you, Keith. You’ll see this through to the end, wherever that might take you. If there’s something out there to find, I’m sure you’ll find it.”

 

Death had done nothing to dull Shiro’s optimism, it would seem. Keith had always pictured ghosts, not that he’d really believed in them, as generally gloomy characters. Dying, as he figured it, was a pretty dismal business. The best you could ask was for it to be quick, painless, and not at too inconvenient or early a time. Shiro’s death, as he understood it, had been none of those things, and yet here he was, laughing and smiling and giving motivational pep talks. The voice of doubt within him whispered that maybe that was just what Keith wanted from him, and so that was how he was, because he wasn’t actually there.

 

“I wish I had a better idea what I was looking for,” he says, silencing his doubts for the time being. “It might make it easier to know where to really start.”

 

Shiro sort of half-floats around Keith’s side, leaning in closer to the coffee table, and gesturing at one of the photographs Keith had taken of a series of nearby rock formations. “What was the significance of these?”

 

Keith shrugs. “I just take pictures of things that… I don’t know, call to me, I guess. That sounds kind of ridiculous when I say it out loud like that, huh. You’re probably sick of hearing me say that I don’t know by now.”

 

“I’m dead,” Shiro deadpans. “I’m pretty happy to hear you saying anything at all.”

 

“Uh,” Keith says, and Shiro grimaces apologetically.

 

“Sorry,” he says. “Too soon?”

 

“Definitely.”

 

They stand together in a somewhat tense silence for a few moments. When Shiro had been alive, he’d been one of the only people Keith had ever felt truly comfortable around. Then, Shiro had left on the Kerberos mission, and they’d been apart for the longest stretch of time since they’d first met, and now… well, now Shiro was dead. Honestly, Keith thinks, it’s probably stranger how comfortable they manage to still be despite all that than it is that it all sometimes breaks down for a little while.

 

“Well, I’m glad you’re here to help,” Keith says after a minute. What he means is more than just that, of course. He’s glad to not be alone. He’s glad to be with him again, even if it has to be like this. His best friend is dead, but not gone, and he can’t even begin to express how glad he is he’s here.

 

Shiro smiles again, simultaneously warm and a little bit unsettling, what with all the teeth. “So am I,” he says, and Keith can tell he means it with a matching depth of sentiment.

 

❧

 

The first few weeks of Shiro’s haunting are a cautious dance. First, the easy part, they both grow back into the idea of always being no more than a short walk and a raised voice of each other. Time corrodes the distance that had grown between them while Shiro was away on his mission like fire burns through dry grass in summer: once the spark is lit, the fire goes until the fuel is gone. Of course, when they’d been at Garrison together, they’d never been quite so close as they are now, with never more than two walls between them, and no peers or regulations to keep them on opposite sides of things for most of their days, the way they had for some time before Shiro had left for Kerberos. Even before Shiro’s graduation to senior officer, his schedule had rarely aligned with Keith’s, and most of their time spent together had been stolen or borrowed, in mornings and evenings, sometimes mealtimes, and every so often, nights.

 

Here, there are no ranks, no commanding officers or orders, no schedules or curfews, and meal time is whenever Keith decides it is, or, more often increasingly, whenever Shiro reminds him he hasn’t eaten in a while. Shiro doesn’t need to eat anymore, or sleep, of course, but all that seems to mean is he’s doubly attentive to when Keith ought to. In their time together before, Keith had always somewhat resented the way Shiro sometimes fussed over him, making sure he kept himself healthy (something Keith was, admittedly, notoriously good at overlooking). Now, he can’t help but accept it, doing his best to push down the pang in his heart each time Shiro reminds him to drink a glass of water or take a nap - Shiro can’t do any of those things anymore, and Keith feels vaguely guilty for making him think about them by forgetting to keep track of them himself. Then again, maybe it feels good for Shiro, like he’s living vicariously through Keith’s most base human experiences by reminding him to keep track of them better.

 

As the days pass into weeks, the two of them fall into an odd rhythm. Most days, Keith is late to bed and late to rise, taking advantage of times when the day is coolest, and sleeping through the hottest parts. If he plans on scouting out too far from the cabin, he packs food along with him, and he eats a light breakfast before they head out, all too aware of the way Shiro prefers to either absent himself or steal the occasional furtive glance at Keith’s meal. His appetite seems to wax and wane with time: some days, a feeling that he can’t describe to Keith as anything but an overpowering sort of homesickness comes over him, and he keeps himself far away from the kitchen, as well as from wherever it is that Keith happens to be sleeping, whether in the creaking bed in the cabin’s single bedroom, or on the sunken futon stretched across one side of its cozy living room. On these days, Keith can feel his heart straining at his ribcage, longing to be able to give Shiro back even one day on his own two feet again.

 

Fortunately for them both, these days are a minority, and most days Shiro doesn’t seem to mind what he’s become much, or if he does, he does a good job of hiding it. Keith isn’t great at reading people, but he knows Shiro, or at least, he had known him, so he hopes he’d know if something were really bothering him. Even so, they haven’t talked about it much yet, about what the world is really like to Shiro now. It’s one of the questions he still hasn’t worked his way up to asking. He’s still not quite ready to hear Shiro tell him how he died, and what it felt like after, what it feels like now. Once, he had asked him if it hurt - not the dying, but the day-to-day. Shiro’s firm assurance was that he felt sensation only as a sort of memory of a dream, dim and distant and easy to ignore; it didn’t hurt to exist any more than it ever had. Keith still wasn’t sure if that was a comforting thought or not.

 

Sometimes, Keith wakes briefly from sleep, as he often does, and sees Shiro watching him. The first few times, it’s a little unnerving. Shiro’s body, such as it is, is softly luminescent at all times, but there in the dark, the single bedroom window shuttered to keep out the morning, it’s a lot more pronounced. His eyes, open with an alien longing, are like little stars. Keith considers asking Shiro to politely knock it off, but then he realises: Shiro can’t sleep anymore, won’t ever breathe or rest or dream, and after that he doesn’t mind so much. He only wishes he knew some way that he could give a little of his humanity over to Shiro, so he wouldn’t have to just sit at the sidelines of living, the way that he does now. Keith wonders what he thinks about, with all that extra time to himself.

 

Not for the first time, Keith is grateful to be the kind of person who doesn’t need a lot of sleep: he hates leaving Shiro there, alone with his longing. When he wakes up, Shiro is almost always there, ready with questions about his dreams, and Keith always tells him whatever he remembers, omitting only the occasional detail that’s too absurd, embarrassing, or private. Keith trusts Shiro with more than he’s ever trusted anyone, even now, but there are some things even he doesn’t need to know.

 

The routine is simple, and they’ve always worked well together. When Keith leaves, taking Shiro’s old hoverbike off far into the distance to gather supplies, Shiro stays behind, and he doesn’t ask too many questions about where Keith got whatever it is he brings back. When Keith goes out, searching for clues, Shiro goes with him. They map the desert around the cabin together, filling the endless red sands with paths of their own imagining. On the long, desperate treks Keith had once made alone, Shiro makes for good company. He’s never short on wonder for the vast desert and all its secrets, stopping to admire the smallest flower and the largest rock edifice alike. Keith wonders if he’d always been like that, and he’d just never noticed quite how much, or if this wonder for life it’s just another side effect of being dead. He has a good eye and a somewhat more analytical mind than Keith does, both of which lend themselves to the survey work quite well. With Shiro’s help, Keith feels like they really are getting closer, even if neither of them knows just what it is they’re trying to find. Perhaps most importantly of all, Shiro never questions Keith’s instincts, or where they lead may them, or why they’re out there at all, filling film rolls and memo pads and only finding more mysteries. He never treats Keith with anything but respect and faith, never meets his vagueries or hairbrained theories with ridicule or doubt, only tries to lend a hand and a second opinion, when he can. He’s better for the second than the first: out of everything they have to get used to, the hardest thing by far is how Shiro _is_ there, just… not quite.

 

Keith has never been a very touch-oriented person. In fact, outside of sparring, he’d always hated being touched. The handful of psychiatrists, social workers, and school officials that had ever been allowed five minutes with him figured it might have something to do with his upbringing: his parents had been gone since before he could remember, and he’d been through fourteen foster homes in seventeen years (including, finally, three different group homes after it became clear he just wasn’t going to find a family that would take him on long term) before finally joining the Garrison just to get free of the system. Keith didn’t really care why, he just wasn’t a touch person. He never had been.

 

Shiro, on the other hand, couldn’t go five minutes without patting someone on the back, laying a hand on their shoulder, or ruffling their hair. The first time he did it to Keith, Keith had flinched away, and he’d taken back his hand immediately. The second time, he’d realised his mistake mid-reach, and apologised. The third time, he’d asked permission first, and Keith had surprised them both by saying yes. By the fifth and sixth times, Keith’s no touching rule had a hard and fast exception. After that, the magnetism between them had just sort of gone forward on its own, until Keith had grown so comfortable with Shiro’s touch that he would even reach out for it on bad days. It was ridiculous, but every time Shiro touched him, it was like a little bit of who he was, all that warmth and energy, just poured into Keith through that contact. It made him stronger, and it made him feel wanted. And every now and then, it made him feel something electric and unplacable that he preferred not to dwell on.

 

That is, it had. The way he was now, Shiro couldn’t touch him at all. He could be right there, right next to him, but he wasn’t really there. Sometimes, Keith thought he would give anything, just to feel Shiro the way he had been one more time - warm skin, strong hands, his broad chest rising and falling with his breath, his cheeks flushed around his entirely human smile. He hated catching himself needing something so much that Shiro couldn’t give, and he kept it to himself, but had seen Shiro reach out, and draw back, and he knew it was wearing at him too. Keith isn’t sure what their future was supposed to have been, but he knows it wasn’t supposed to be like this.

 

❧

 

Three months after Shiro disappears, Keith finally works up the courage to ask him how he died. He knows the reports were wrong, and he can’t see Shiro just up and crashing anyway; he was the best pilot Keith had ever seen. Pilots like that didn’t just smash into alien moons, or whatever the official story was. To be honest, Keith hadn’t paid it very close attention. He’d been too busy wrecking his simulator score, not to mention his hand, and getting thrown out for insubordination and infighting.

 

“I don’t know for sure,” Shiro admits after a tentative look and a few moments of heavy silence. He knows how careful Keith has been to skirt around outright discussing the fact that he’s dead. “You can call me crazy if you want, but the last thing I remember was… there was another ship,” he says, hesitating, as if the memory is faded, or painful, or both.

 

“I’ve had you wandering around the desert with me, trying to find something I’m not even sure exists, let alone what it might be, pretty much because my Spidey Sense is telling me it’s out there,” Keith deadpans. “At this point it would be pretty hypocritical of me to call you crazy for believing in aliens.” He pauses. “That is what you meant, right?”

 

Shiro sighs, and nods slowly in resignation. “I think so,” he says. “It’s all kind of a mess in here.” He taps the side of his head with a translucent finger. For a moment, Keith can make out the outline of his skull, and he shivers inadvertently. “I guess it makes sense that it would be,” he frowns, “though that doesn’t make it any less frustrating. I always thought ghosts would be pretty fixated on how they died, you know? Not just… missing half the details of how it happened in the first place.”

 

“Maybe that’s where the fixation comes from,” Keith suggests. “From the wanting to know. Not that I’m any kind of ghost expert,” he adds, and Shiro laughs. “I didn’t even believe they existed until you went and came back as one.”

 

“If it’s any consolation,” Shiro tells him, “I didn’t believe in them until right around then either.”

 

“It’s all kind of funny, isn’t it?” Keith says.

 

Shiro raises a hand, examining the telltale shimmer of bones through phantom muscle and skin. “Not really,” he admits.

 

“Yeah, I guess not.”

 

The silence that settles in around them is pensive, companionable, and relatively brief. If there’s one thing they’ve gotten really, really good at, it’s the art of just being alone together.

 

Finally, Shiro says, “There is a little bit more I remember, about how I died. It isn’t just bam! Ship! Poof! Ghost!” Keith can’t help himself but to smile at that. It’s weird as hell, if he takes too long to think about it. He never could have foreseen where he is now, laughing with his dead best friend about how he may or may not have been murdered by aliens. He supposes it’s true then, that just anything can become your new normal if you have no other choice. “I remember a lot of purple, though I don’t know if that was the ship, or the things inside, or both. I don’t know if we ever saw them up close, come to think of it. I remember Matt, my friend, trying to make for cover. I don’t know if he made it. I’m pretty sure it didn’t matter. I remember a lot of sound, and then no sound. Someone was screaming, or everyone was, or maybe it was just me. There had to have been blood.” Keith wants to tell him that he doesn’t have to keep going, but something holds him back. Maybe it’s the way Shiro shows no signs of stopping, how Keith suspects he needs to say this a lot more than Keith needs to hear it.

 

Shiro takes a deep breath ( _Muscle memory,_ Keith thinks. He can’t help but take note when Shiro does something distinctly living, even though he doesn’t need to.), and he keeps going. “I remember a lot of fear,” he says, “not just mine either, but I don’t remember any pain. I don’t think I lasted long enough to see the worst of it. And I remember the shape of the ship, or at least, a vague outline. I could draw it for you,” he adds, and then, “I already have, a few times. You may have a point, about fixating on the missing details.” He grins. “You might make it as a ghost expert yet.”

 

“Thanks,” Keith deadpans, turning the scene of Shiro’s death over and over in his mind’s eye. _Fear, but no pain,_ he thinks. It’s something, anyway. “That’s always been my real mission in life, you know.”

 

“Well,” Shiro says, an extra sparkle in his luminous eyes, “you’re lucky to have such a fascinating specimen right here to study, then. I don’t mean to alarm you, but I happen to have it on good authority that your house is haunted.”

 

❧

 

Six months after Shiro disappears, Keith realises that he’s falling in love with him. Or maybe it’s fallen, past tense, and maybe it’s been that way for a lot longer than he’s been willing to admit. Maybe he hasn’t had his feet firmly planted on the ground for a long time now. It hits him while they’re out walking together, the moon above them, casting the desert in an an ethereal light, and Shiro stops for a full minute just to take it in.

 

“It’s not a full moon until tomorrow,” Keith points out, not bothering to look up. He’s seen plenty of moons.

 

Shiro’s voice is soft and pensive, his expression serene. “I know,” he says. “But it sure is beautiful, isn’t it?”

 

Keith is about to reply, probably something vaguely dismissive, when it just sort of all falls into place. He feels like the world’s worst walking cliche, unable to take his eyes away from Shiro’s glowing face, and all he can think is that he’s never seen anything more beautiful in his entire life. For a single, dazzling moment, his heart seems to beat right out of his chest, and he feels dizzy, and euphoric, and stupid, and then it all comes crashing down as he realises that nothing has changed: they’ve been searching for six months, and they’ve only found more questions, and his future is still up in smoke, and Shiro is still dead. Keith feels months of stolen glances and flushed cheeks and traded smiles flood backwards past him like a film reel rewinding, and the burst of euphoria dies in his chest, and sinks like a stone into his gut. _Why now?_ he thinks angrily, finally tearing his gaze away from Shiro, who’s still staring up at the moon, presumably completely clueless about the emotional rollercoaster Keith is on a few paces away. _Why couldn’t I have loved him when he was alive?_ he thinks, but of course, what he really means, as always, is, _Why did he have to die?_

  
They haven’t talked about the future yet, about what’s going to happen to them as Keith grows older and Shiro doesn’t, but he’s pretty sure Shiro doesn’t want to see him live out his days in some haunted house out in the middle of nowhere in the desert. He isn’t so sure anymore if he’d mind that so much, though. Now that he has the words, there’s a dam that breaks, and he braces himself for the flood, for all the good that does. Falling for your best friend is hard enough when they’re alive. Falling for your dead best friend just really fucking sucks.


	2. we're so close to something better left unknown

About two weeks after Keith realises that he’s in love with Shiro, they hit a wall in their searching. The area all around the cabin has been thoroughly documented and mapped, charts drawn and photographs taken, developped painstakingly in the bathroom that Keith had converted into a passable darkroom months before. The trouble is, there’s only so far Keith can walk in one day before he has to turn back. The desert is vast and inhospitable, filled with strange creatures, baking in the day and freezing at night, and Keith can only carry so much food with him at a time anyway, so staying out for longer trips is more or less completely out of the question. He’d spent a few nights out there, shivering through threadbare blankets and unable to sleep for the unnerving silence, peppered with strange, inexplicable noises, back in the few weeks before Shiro had first appeared, and even with Shiro there now to stay out with him, he doesn’t really feel like doing it again.

 

At one point, Shiro points out that, while he can’t take notes or pictures physically, he could go out without Keith, further than Keith can go. He doesn’t have to stop to rest, and neither hunger nor heat affect him, after all. Keith figures it’s worth a shot, which is how they find out that Shiro seems to be tied to Keith somehow. There’s only a certain distance he can go from him before Shiro starts to go fuzzy around the edges, and only so much farther he can go from there before he sort of blacks out, slipping back into existence safe at home again. The first time it happens, Keith is sitting on the sofa, reading a book and trying not to let the anxiety of solitude creep in on him too much; he’d never minded being alone too much before, but he’s just not used to it now. He nearly drops his book when Shiro suddenly appears beside him, looking equally surprised. They try a few more times, testing to see how far Shiro can go from Keith before he starts losing substance, but it doesn’t sit right with either of them, and it’s pretty clearly not the solution they’d been hoping for, so they don’t waste too much time on it. If he’s being honest, Keith is a little bit relieved. He’s just too used to Shiro’s presence. He’s not even sure he’d be able to sleep properly anymore if Shiro stopped being there. _Like a kid with a nightlight,_ he thinks. Only, it’s waking up to find that there _isn’t_ a monster in his closet that scares him.

 

With nothing left to survey in the desert outside, they find themselves spending more and more idle time together, Keith growing increasingly restless as the days roll by and they go over everything they’ve already collected what feels like a thousand times. On the bright side of things, Keith’s intuition, which has gotten him this far, tells him that what they’re looking for _is_ somewhere within the distance they’ve already gone. In theory, that means they’re one step closer. In practice, it’s just one more detail to drive Keith over the edge with frustration.

 

“It’s like we’re looking for the needle in the haystack, only we’ve never seen a needle before, don’t remember what they’re called, and, fuck, I don’t know!” Keith half-shouts in exasperation. He paces back and forth in the small space between coffee table and the wall he uses as a cork board to pin up connections between clues they’ve collected. “Like we’re looking for a needle in a haystack but we have so little clue about needles that we come from a planet where they don’t exist because no one even wears clothes to begin with or something!”

 

Shiro, who is doing a decent impression of sitting on the sofa, laughs softly. Keith shoots him an irate look, but Shiro raises an eyebrow and grins. “A world with no clothes, huh?” he says, and Keith feels his cheeks burning a little, hoping Shiro won’t notice. On that front, anyway, Shiro hasn’t proven particularly observant so far. Or maybe it’s just that nothing’s really changed at all about how Keith actually acts or feels, except that now he’s put a name to it all, and also he thinks about kissing Shiro a lot more than he used to.

 

“If you have a better metaphor, or a suggestion on how to get us out of it,” Keith retorts, “I am all ears.”

 

“No,” Shiro replies, a wry smile on his lips, “I think the world with no clothes sounds great.” And okay, maybe realising that he’s in love with Shiro _has_ changed something, because he knows Shiro hasn’t just started making jokes like that out of the blue, it’s just that Keith no longer has any idea how to respond to them.

 

“You’re mocking me,” Keith accuses, crossing his arms over his chest.

 

Shiro feigns shock. “I wouldn’t dare!” he says, but he’s laughing again, and before he knows it, so is Keith. Even if he never finds a way to tell him, Keith catches himself thinking, even if they never get further than where they are now, he could be happy with Shiro, out here in their desert. He’s not about to say for forever, but definitely close to it. Keith doesn’t feel alone anymore, and even stagnant in their quest as they are now, he doesn’t lack for purpose. He has a home, and a mission, and someone to share them with. He’s happy. Isn’t that what life is all about? Cautiously, he starts to think about future plans. He starts to think about staying.

 

“We should get a computer,” Shiro says, somewhat out of the blue, breaking in on Keith’s reveries.

 

Keith blinks back at him. “Uh… why?”

 

“Think about it. We have all this data, but compiling it by hand isn’t getting us very far. I don’t know a lot about programming or anything, but isn’t there some kind of way we could plug in what we’ve got here and maybe find something we haven’t seen yet?”

 

“You really don’t know how computers work, do you?” Keith asks, and Shiro looks sheepish.

 

“Unless they’re the ones you use to fly things, then uh, no,” he admits. “But you’re decent at that stuff, right? Besides, you and me? I’m sure we have more than enough stubbornness to drum _something_ out of a machine, we’d just have to keep at it.”

 

Keith can’t help but laugh. “That is really, really not how computers work,” he says, but he’s already running over in his head where and how he might be able to get his hands on something, if only because they really don’t have anything better to do, and, well… maybe a little because he wants Shiro to notice that he’s taking on his ideas. “Next supply run,” he promises after a minute’s consideration. “I’ll see what I can find. Getting something running will give me something to do with my hands for a few days, anyway, even if nothing comes of it other than moving the decor around here into the modern era,” he adds, which elicits another low chuckle from Shiro that burrows its way right into Keith’s heart and nests there, filling his entire body with warmth and making his next couple of breaths into something of an ordeal. He makes a concerted study of his shoes, so Shiro won’t see how embarrassing he’s sure he must look. Being in love, he decides, is probably the single most impractical aspect of human evolution.

 

Over the next few weeks, Keith busies himself with a series of dead-of-the-night runs, taking the hoverbike in as close to the Garrison as he ever dares risk, keeping his pace slow and the engines running at the lowest possible purr, and walking the rest of the way in. If he’s honest, he’s glad to have these brief excursions to himself - for every piece of him that never wants to be away from Shiro for even a single second, there’s another, slightly more self-aware piece that knows the more time they’re together, the higher the statistical likelihood is of him doing something really, really stupid, and ruining everything. Which, considering that Shiro’s entire existence seems to be quite literally bound to his, seems like an especially bad plan. Haunting someone with intense, unrequited feelings for you would probably kind of suck, Keith figures. It’s in both of their best interests if he keeps it to himself, even if that means finding excuses that he doesn’t exactly want to make in order to spend just a little less time together. Of course, he also doesn’t want Shiro to think he’s avoiding him, and he still feels like he’s seeing the sunrise for the first time every time he’s near him, so it’s a balancing act. Picking up on the frequency of his supply runs, each of which tend to take just a few hours, seems to him like a pretty ideal way to get a little distance, just not too much. As far as what comes after this particular distraction wears out, well… he’ll burn that bridge when he gets there.

 

By now, Keith knows his way around the store-yards and outbuildings as well as he knows the desert out by the cabin, and he has no problem dodging cameras, lights, and security officers, in order to salvage what he can. If Shiro suspects that ‘salvage’ might just be the word Keith uses to make ‘steal’ sound a little less harsh, he keeps it to himself. For his part, Keith’s stance on ownership comes mostly from formative repeat viewings of Aladdin as a kid (one of his better foster parents had been a woman who mostly let the TV take care of him for her, and of her limited collection, that had always been his favourite), tempered by a life of applying that philosophy out of necessity, and a handful of somewhat radical blogs he’d probably read too much of in his early teenage years.

 

Besides, the Garrison is just like everywhere else. As long as he never takes anything that anyone will miss too much, he doubts anyone even notices it’s gone at all. Half the things he relieves them of are marked for disposal anyway. One week, he might take a  box or two of rations from an inbound shipment, or some outdated equipment from a tech warehouse with a weak lock, the next he’ll make off with a couple of old blankets and a zip-locked uniform bag full of some officer’s recently laundered socks. It’s not exactly big time heist stuff, although he admits he’d have loved to have seen the face of whoever wound up realising they’d lost that last one. Of all the Garrison’s senior officers he’d known, Shiro was the only one he hadn’t thought could use to be taken down a peg. Or six.

 

Keith has been making supply runs to the Garrison ever few weeks for a while now, mostly to relieve them of a few boxes of rations when the cabin’s cupboards start to run low. Food is simple, though. He’s long since memorized the schedule of when new shipments come in, and he knows the patrols well enough that he’s never been spotted lightening their loads a bit. Sorting out where and how to find useful tech is a little trickier of a prospect, even with his previous knowledge of the Garrison’s layout from his time there as a cadet. The warehouses seem like a safe bet, but they tend to be equipped with cameras and a lot more lights than the road out behind the cafeteria, not to mention significantly better locks. It takes him about a week to figure out a way into the first one he sets his sights on, and he’s relieved to discover that the ones surrounding it prove similar in layout and security.  

 

Keith had always been better with technology than Shiro, but he’s no engineer, and certainly no programmer, so it’s slow going in trying to figure out what to take, and what to do with it once he has it. When he has the chance, he more or less just grabs whatever he can most easily get his hands on, and then actually carry back with him, avoiding duplicates unless he knows he needs them, and leaving it until it’s safe back home to sort out what he has, and how to make it into something useful. About a month into their supercomputer scheme, it hasn’t really achieved much more than making their living room look a little cooler, but neither one of them is ready to admit that all they’ve really accomplished is some home decorating and misdemeanour theft, and that none of it has gotten them closer to the energy source they’re after.

 

If only they had the means to build a machine that could track down what Keith knows is out there, to break down the data they have and make it into something useful, something that could run a real scan of the area to detect irregularities that just aren’t evident to the naked eye… but they don’t, and Keith has to accept that. He manages to get his hands on a simple working computer that he uses to compile some of the mapping they’ve done, but for all their effort, the rest of the equipment doesn’t really get them much farther than that. After a while, both he and Shiro accept this as just another dead end, and decide to go back to what they know best: Keith’s instincts, and what few distinct oddities that those instincts have lead them to thus far. Keith is used to roadblocks by now, and he does his best not to fixate on it. Shiro, for his part, seems impressed enough that Keith had even gotten any of it running, let alone genuinely functional. Besides, Keith knows he’s just along for the ride: this is Keith’s mission, not Shiro’s. He just doesn’t have the same need to see it out to the end. Keith doesn’t mind that Shiro isn’t invested the same way he is, though. The fact that Shiro works as hard as he does, seemingly just because he knows it matters to Keith, is more than enough.

 

After they declare the tech idea to pretty much be a bust, Keith lets the equipment stay wherever he’s assembled it, shutting it down to conserve the power he’s already worried they’re going to be noticed diverting from the Garrison sooner or later. It’s fortunate for their sake that the Garrison is so remarkably inattentive for an establishment of its kind, or he’s fairly sure they would have been evicted months ago. Occasionally, he even wonders if the Garrison is letting him stay there, keeping his power and water running intentionally for some reason, but it isn’t a thought he entertains very seriously. Sure, he’d been one of their best and brightest once, but that was in the past. They’re sure to have a new star pupil now, and he can’t see them wasting energy on a misfire like him that they’ll never see a profit from. They may talk a good game on altruism, playing up the wonder of space exploration and the importance of their work and every individual involved in it, but that’s all brochure talk. When you get down to it, they’re like any other government institution: they don’t give a shit about you beyond what they have to do to get something from you.

 

So long as he doesn’t dwell on what it means for his future, the fact that he’d lost his only real prospect, and that he’ll likely never fly again, he’s actually glad to be out of there. He certainly doesn’t miss the bullshit and bureaucracy, or all the assholes who thought they were better than he was because of an extra stripe or two on their shoulders. The fact of the matter was, he’d joined the Garrison because there just hadn’t been anywhere else for him to really go. His motivations had been simple: he needed a plan to get himself out of foster care, so he wouldn’t end up on the streets when he aged out of the system. He wasn’t like some of the other cadets with their big dreams and earnest intentions. Sure, he’d been a damn good pilot, and who hadn’t looked up at the night sky and longed to see it for themself, from time to time? But he wasn’t one of those kids who’d grown up dreaming of being an astronaut or whatever; if he’d had any childhood aspirations, they’d long since been worn out of him in favour of survival. Which wasn’t to say that he’d hated everything about the Garrison, it was just that he didn’t have a lot of lingering fondness for the place since it had disposed of him. In the end, the only things that had really kept him there had been Shiro, the stars, and a distant promise of one day finding somewhere that felt like home. Out here in his desert, he has all three. It’s enough.

 

❧

 

Eight months after Shiro disappears, Keith is standing in the kitchen, heating up a can of beans over the stove. At Shiro’s insistence, he’s even doing it in an actual pot, though he doesn’t really see the point. It’s just one more thing he has to wash when he’s done, and it’s not like Shiro can help with the dishes, he’d pointed out.

 

“Nope,” Shiro says. “I’m afraid all I can do with dishes is throw them across the room in a fit to spook the new tenants.” Keith is pretty sure he’s joking. Shiro is overly cheery in the way he always seems to be when Keith is still waking up, head heavy with the last fragments of his most recent in a series of odd dreams he could never quite remember once he’d woken up. He’d actually started a dream diary the week before, hoping to coax his memory into submission on the harebrained notion that maybe his dreams are trying to tell him something about the energy source, which is why he keeps waking up from them so mixed up, but so far it hasn’t yielded much in the way of results. All he really remembers from that morning’s dream, for instance, is that he’d been in some kind of castle. The only distinct image that still sticks in his mind is of a clear, piercing shade of blue, which he thinks was a part of the castle, though he isn’t sure. And Shiro had been there, and he’d been alive, but that part wasn’t odd; Keith rarely dreamed of anything else. The day before, he’d dreamed Shiro alive with him in a vast desert savannah, surrounded by a pride of lions. The day before, he’d dreamed Shiro alive with him at some kind of celebration; all he remembers of that one was something about a ceremonial dance.

 

He’d started the dream diary in hopes of noticing a pattern that might yield some new clue to point him towards the energy source. Instead, it serves him only as another reminder of what he’ll never have. He doesn’t exactly need his dreams to tell him that he wishes Shiro were still alive, though. Other than finding the energy source, it’s almost all he thinks about. In idle moments, he’s constantly catching himself trying to remember little things about him that aren’t there anymore: what he smelled like, the way his hands felt, how dark his eyes had been. Of course, he’s often caught up in more than memories. If he lets his thoughts wander, he inevitably finds himself wondering what it would have felt like to kiss him, even just once. He imagines the warmth of his breath, the softness of his lips, even what his mouth might have tasted like. When he catches himself in daydreams, Keith always drags himself out quickly, feeling flushed and breathless. Sometimes, he tells himself it’s good that he’ll never find out what it would really be like: if just thinking about it can incapacitate him like this, he has no idea what the real thing might do.

 

Keith is caught up in just one such fantasy when Shiro appears beside him at the stove, startling him out of his head so thoroughly that he actually jumps slightly. Usually, Shiro makes efforts to move like an actual person; he walks from room to room, he sits on chairs normally, he tries not to phase through things if he can help it, and he even seems to breathe, though Keith knows he doesn’t need to do any of that. From what Shiro has told him, it’s a combination between a force of habit and an effort to keep some degree of normalcy. Keith has assured him on multiple occasions that he doesn’t need Shiro to act any certain way for his sake, but Shiro had brushed him off; he acts as human as he can as much for his own comfort as for Keith’s, which Keith can understand. As such, when Shiro does do something especially, well, ghostlike, like apparate across the kitchen, it tends to catch Keith off guard.

 

The hair on the back of his neck is standing up as he glares down into his pot of beans, trying to push away the thoughts he’d been entertaining of nights they’d spent together, back at the Garrison. Although, admittedly, it isn’t the memories that he’s trying to get out of his head - it’s the embellishments he’d been making to them. They’d never actually done the things he’d been daydreaming about. Sometimes he wonders, if they’d known how little time they had left to do them, if they might have when they’d had the chance. Of course, he hadn’t had those kind of thoughts back then. Not to mention, he’s pretty sure Shiro doesn’t even have them now, so it’s kind of a moot point. He wishes that he could just logic his way out of dwelling on it, but logic seems to have no effect on his awful, awful heart. Being in love is terrible. He’s terrible. Shiro, leaning over his shoulder with a spectral grin that should definitely not make Keith’s awful heart speed up like that, is especially terrible.

 

“What?” he demands, pointedly not looking in Shiro’s direction. “You know I hate when you do that weird teleporting thing to sneak up on me. You’re abusing your ghost privilege.”

 

“I just thought you’d like to know that you’re burning your beans,” Shiro points out casually. He drifts a little further from Keith, so he’s not completely hovering over his shoulder, and adds, “You seem a little out of it.”

 

Keith swears colourfully and shifts the beans off the burner, stirring at them uselessly. He hadn’t noticed. “I guess I am,” he admits flatly, hoping Shiro will take the hint in his tone and drop it. He doesn’t.

 

“Something about your dreams again?” Shiro guesses, and Keith considers for a moment before shaking his head slightly.

 

He frowns. “It’s not quite that. I don’t know. There’s nothing really there, but they still bother me. I mean, I woke up sweating the other day because I had a dream about some lions,” he says. “That’s just… weird.”

 

“Only if you’re not afraid of lions.”

 

Keith redirects his glare in Shiro’s direction. “I have only the most healthy and abstract fear of lions,” he asserts. “Anyway, it wasn’t a nightmare. I’ve already told you: if I knew why they were bothering me, I probably wouldn’t be bothered anymore. I just wake up feeling like I’m missing something important, I guess. I can’t explain it any better than that.” He scrapes idly at the pot with his spoon, and sighs, giving up. “These beans are a part of this pot forever now,” he announces, and Shiro laughs, melting the frustration right out of him. It’s hard to be stay upset when Shiro is right there, shimmering slightly in the early evening, his smile lighting up the whole room. He decides to put the dreams out of his head, for now, and sets about finding something he can eat that isn’t blackened onto a pot bottom. It’s getting on time for another supply run soon, but in the meantime there’s plenty of other cans in the cupboard. He grabs a can of fruit cocktail, ignoring Shiro’s admonitions that it in no way constitutes a full meal.

 

Shiro sighs disapprovingly, accepting another loss in the ongoing battle for Keith’s health, and announces that he’s going to go look over the charts they’d left laid out on the coffee table earlier that day. Keith is somewhat relieved to see him go, not only because he’s still pretty caught up in thinking about kissing him and really needs some space to clear his head, but also because frankly he kind of hates it when Shiro watches him eat. It’s always the worst combination of nostalgic longing and some kind of vague concern - Keith knows he could stand to eat a little better, but he still doesn’t like it when Shiro points it out too much. It had been a lot more tolerable back when he was still alive, before Keith had to deal with the guilt that tended to well up in him any time he did something in front of Shiro that Shiro couldn’t do anymore. He knows Shiro doesn’t want him beating himself up over things like that, but he can’t really help it, especially when he knows how much Shiro misses food. In that respect, he almost wishes they could just flat out trade - he’s always had kind of a weird time with food, and of all the various trappings of being alive he can think of, he’s pretty sure he’d miss needing to eat the least.

 

Once Shiro is out of the room, Keith sits down at the little dining table, which shakes slightly on its wobbly legs as he sets the can down on it. He eats the contents in careful order, picking out all the cherries first, because he can never decide if they’re terrific or disgusting, then moving onto the grapes and pears, which are definitely disgusting (it’s the textures, the former is much too squishy, the latter tends to feel like moist sand), and finally polishing off the peaches, which as usual make the whole thing seem worthwhile. He drinks the remainder of the syrup straight out of the can, winces slightly at the sugar rush, and then tosses the can into the sink to deal with later. His stomach protests, though he’s not sure whether it’s more to the sugar overload or just that he’s still hungry; he ignores it either way. He’ll eat more later, after he gets some work done with Shiro. Probably, anyway.

  


❧

 

“Keith, look at this.” Shiro is peering at one of a handful of photos that Keith had blown up to look at in closer detail. He wishes they had the equipment to enhance the pictures digitally somehow, the way people always do in crime shows and stuff, but he’d had no luck finding anything like a scanner back when he’d been scavenging for tech; enhancing things the old fashioned way will just have to do. The particular photo that Shiro’s looking at is one they must’ve been over a dozen times at least, even though it’s not that interesting really: an outcropping consisting of a few red rock formations of assorted heights, a little bit of sagebrush, an expanse of blue sky. It looks like it could make a decent postcard, more than anything else. _Wish you were here._

 

“It’s just rocks,” Keith says, “rocks we’ve seen a million times,” but he looks where Shiro is pointing anyway, because he remembers the feeling he’d had taking that picture, and because Shiro is so intent on it.

 

At first, he doesn’t see what Shiro is pointing at, and he turns to him with an eyebrow raised skeptically. It really is just rocks. Maybe they’re just burning out, grasping at straws. It isn’t the first time it’s occurred to him that they might be following a path that doesn’t have anything _but_ dead ends. He taps the picture where Shiro is pointing, fixing him with an unimpressed expression, but Shiro corrects him. “No,” he says, “not there, _there.”_ He points Keith a quarter centimetre or so to the left, and Keith’s eyes widen slowly.

 

“That’s… that’s something, isn’t it,” he says slowly, studying the blurry mark. “I mean, it could be nothing, but…”

 

“...it could be something,” Shiro finishes for him. “It looks like some kind of pictogram. I can’t believe we’ve never noticed it before.”

 

The two of them squint at the photo a while longer, bodies pressed so close together that Shiro’s arm sort of… fades into Keith’s after a moment, filling him with a not wholly unpleasant chill. He’s almost too engrossed in the picture to dwell on that proximity, but only almost; he can’t help but think about how warm Shiro used to be, and about how nice it is to be near him anyway now that he’s not. He doesn’t want to get his hopes up too much, but he also sort of wants to go grab the hoverbike and head out to where they’d taken the picture pretty much immediately, so they can get a better look at, well, whatever it is. It’s been months since they made any real progress.

 

“So?” Shiro says. Keith swears he’s glowing a little more than he usually does.

 

“...so?”

 

“So we’re going to go check it out, right?”

 

Keith grins, and heads to grab the hoverbike’s keys from their hook by the door, moving around the living room to gather up a handful of supplies (his camera, a spare roll of film just in case, a memo pad and pen, some transfer paper) after they’re stowed in the pocket of his jeans. “Last one to the bike is a rotten egg,” he announces, forgetting that Shiro can basically teleport, a fact which he now exploits with a wink and a soft whooshing sound as he dematerialises out of the living room. “Show off!” Keith calls after him as he reappears outside the front door, but he’s smiling. He climbs onto the hoverbike and pulls a hairband off his wrist, tying his hair back into a messy bun, to keep it from tickling the back of his neck when they ride. The evening air is surprisingly cool, rustling through his loose bangs. It feels like the wind is changing. It feels like the desert whispering a promise.

 

When they reach the outcropping, Keith practically throws himself from the hoverbike, hitting the ground on all fours and bouncing up to run the rest of the way to the anomaly from the photo. It had been in the background of the photo, just barely farther out than they had ever gone before, but he still can’t believe they’d never seen it. As he draws closer, it’s unmistakeable: there is definitely something there, carved into the rock. It’s a little worn away, eroded by wind and time, but still distinct.

 

“Shiro,” he says, touching the carving almost reverently. “Look. It’s a lion.” Under his fingers, the stone itself seems to hum. He’s never felt the energy this strongly anywhere; whatever they’ve been looking for, it has to be here.

 

At his side, eyes wide with curious wonder, and a hint of something Keith thinks might be pride, Shiro smiles softly. “Maybe that dream diary wasn’t a waste of time after all, huh?” he says, and Keith breaks into a broad grin. _Of course,_ he thinks. _The lion dream._ He wonders what significance there might be in the rest of his dreams, if that one has anything to do with this carving. “Come on,” says Shiro after a minute, drifting off around the corner of the marked formation, “let’s see if there’s anything more around here.” Keith takes a moment to step back and snap a few photos of the carving, returns his camera to his bag, and reaches out to touch it one last time before following Shiro.

 

Over the next few short hours, they find four more carvings, all unique, but all depicting the same thing: a great lion, drawn to the stars. Beneath the earth, it sleeps, but not forever. Someday, the carvings seem to say, the lion will rise. Everything Keith’s been feeling for months, everything he’s been dreaming of, it all fits. Some great energy, dormant out in the desert for untold eons, waiting to be uncovered, longing to return to the stars. He feels now more than ever that it needs him, that it wants him to find it. Shiro watches him, captivated, as he presses paper to the rock face, taking a rubbing of their most recent discovery. Keith feels almost lightheaded, his whole body coursing with energy. He fills both rolls of film with pictures of the area, not even caring that he’s wasting it on near-identical duplicates, and eagerly notes down anything else he can think of in his memo pad.

 

In the end, Shiro has to coax him back to the hoverbike to head back to the cabin so he can rest before they do anything else, reminding him that they’d left abruptly, and that Keith hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and hadn’t really slept much the night before. If it were up to him, he’d just stay there all day, forever, as long as it took to follow the carvings to their source. They’re so close he can almost taste it. Just as he’s arguing that he doesn’t need to take a break, though, Shiro catches his stomach betraying him by growling, and Keith gives in, if only because the hottest part of the day is sneaking up on them. Staying out too late means sweat-soaked hair, dripping down the back of his neck and into his eyes, not to mention the way it makes his hands feel clammy and awful in his gloves: it’s sensory hell, and he definitely prefers to avoid it when he can.

 

The only part of the whole discovery that sort of sticks in his chest is how badly he wants to reach out and touch Shiro. Victory gets tangled up with desire, and it kills him that he can’t turn to Shiro and kiss him right there, all bright-faced and celebratory. Riding the high of each new carving they find, he feels like he should be able to do anything, and not being able to do the one thing he wants to do most in the world puts the slightest of dampers on the whole affair. He wonders if Shiro can see it in his face, and for a few golden hours, he doesn’t even care if he does. Right now, Keith is so invincible, he even believes that Shiro could love him back.

 

As they ride back to the cabin together, he lets his eyes close for a few moments, and imagines Shiro’s arms, warm and strong and human, wrapped around his waist. He imagines how his chest would feel, pressed against Keith’s back, the rise and fall of his breathing, the hammering of his triumphant heartbeat. When he opens his eyes again, he lets the daydreams fade with a deep breath, and as he does, his breath catches in his throat. Shiro’s presence is a cold wind on the back of his neck, vague and soft and dangerously close. When he turns his head, Shiro is right there, not lingering at the back of the hoverbike as he usually is, but sitting right behind Keith, so close to how he’d just been imagining him that it makes his heart sort of stop for a moment. “Great work out there today,” Shiro says, and then, slowly, he closes his eyes, and lets his head come to rest on the back of Keith’s shoulder. Keith is aware, all too intensely, of how solid he feels, and he has to touch him, so he does, taking one hand off the hoverbike’s handles and reaching back, to gingerly brush Shiro’s cheek. He remembers the last time he’d tried to touch Shiro like this, months ago, and the way his hand had passed right through him, and he wonders what’s changed. He wonders how long it will last. He doesn’t want to ruin this moment, doesn’t want to push it too hard and wind up over the edge, but he’s terrified that he might not get another chance. His heart is rabbit-fast, and Shiro is so close that he’s sure he can hear it, maybe even feel it. Usually, that would terrify him, but now he can’t help but hope Shiro is listening to every single heartbeat. He hopes he knows that they’re all for him. Keith can feel the last of his caution burning up in the desert heat. He doesn’t think he’ll miss it much.

 

When they finally reach the cabin, Keith hesitates to get off the hoverbike for a moment, watching Shiro open his eyes and lift his head. Sometime during the ride, his arms had found their way around Keith’s body, and neither of them seem to want to let go. Neither of them seem to be able to say anything, either, like they’re caught in some witch’s spell. Finally, Keith kills the engine, and it parks with a soft shudder, which jostles them both back into reality.

 

“Ok,” Keith says once they both have their feet on the ground. He’s not about to let them just walk off what happened. He’s not about to let it be another daydream. “I have something really, really stupid to say, and I need to say it before I freak out and I need you to shut up and not say anything until I’m done.”

 

Shiro is still smiling, which is doing stupid, awful things to Keith’s heart. Either that or he has heatstroke. Actually, there’s a strong possibility of it being both, but at this point he just cannot find it in him to care. “Go for it,” Shiro says, so Keith does.

 

“I don’t know how to say this right, and I don’t know what I’m doing, and I feel like a complete idiot for about a million reasons,” Keith says, his words coming out too fast, each one seeming to crash into the last. There's a strong possibility that he's having a heart attack. “But the thing is that you make me feel like an idiot pretty much all of the time, and I’m pretty sure that I actually act like one around you a lot, and you have to have noticed, because I am a terrible actor, and I’m completely tactless, and I have no idea how to read people right. Except sometimes I can read you, and I don’t feel weird around you, and you don’t mind that I’m tactless, and you never make me feel like I’m weird. You make me feel like I’m okay, or, no, way better than okay. You make me feel amazing, and like I’m amazing, and that’s amazing, because you’re amazing?”

 

His head is spinning, and Shiro is staring at him sort of dumbfounded with an expression Keith can’t read at all, and Keith can’t seem to say what he wants to say but he can’t seem to shut up either. _If I could just die of heatstroke now, it would be a good time,_ he thinks, except that Shiro’s dead too, so with his luck, Keith would just come back as a ghost too, so even that wouldn’t get him out of this disaster. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” he says. He wants so, so badly to stop staring right into Shiro’s eyes, because they feel like they’re burning holes right through him, but he can’t seem to look away, or move pretty much at all, so he just kind of… lets go. “That was terrible,” he apologises, “and I’m kind of terrible, and this whole situation is terrible, because you’re dead and I kind of wish I was dead right now, which I definitely regret saying because that is a horrible thing to say to a dead person, but, well, for what it’s worth… I am really, really in love with you. And it’s been months, maybe longer, maybe pretty much forever, because you’re incredible, and I love you, and I want to kiss you so badly, and I think about it literally all the time and it’s completely terrible.” He pauses for a second. “Also I think I have heatstroke.”

 

Shiro’s slow, dawning smile is the single most beautiful thing that Keith has ever seen, but it’s nothing compared to what it feels like when he opens his mouth, and just says, “Would it make it less terrible, if I said I was in love with you too?”


End file.
